In Bed Together: EDF & the Walton Family

Since 2004, the Walton Family Foundation has given EDF (the Environmental Defense Fund) more than $53 million. Last year, the foundation’s donations totaled an astounding 15 percent of EDF’s budget, or $13.7 million. This news generated a front page New York Times...

Some Big Steps Yield a Small One of Our Own

Here’s a retailing truth: You can’t be in the business of selling consumer products without thinking about Walmart. The merchandising behemoth sells so much of what so many North Americans buy — from groceries to tires — that to not seek it as...

Strange Bedfellows?

Why Seventh Generation is Doing Business with Walmart’s Marketside Stores I’ve sometimes said that hell would freeze over before Seventh Generation would ever do business with Walmart. In fact, at times I’ve made even more strongly worded statements. Now I’ve...

Walmart & the Sins of Our Fathers

“Judge King wrote that Ms. Braun had recounted the humiliating experience of soiling herself while at work because she had not been permitted time to use the restroom.” I hope that the recent ruling by a Minnesota state judge, who found that Walmart...

The Wal-Mart CEO Sustainability Summit

Imagine 400 CEOs representing Walmart’s largest vendors all sitting in one room pondering the future of sustainability. Aside from representing trillions of dollars in market value, this group could change the course of history. As I observed from the third row of...

What is it they still don’t get?

Yesterday the Financial Times reported “Nuns shocked at being on Wal-Mart’s list of threats. A community of Benedictine nuns based in Texas has called on Wal-Mart to give further details of how they came to appear on a list of potential threats to the...

The Annals of Spin

This weeks New Yorker Magazine (4/2/07) features a long negative story about Wal-Mart’s effort to “co-opt liberals.” This is another in the series of good news/bad news stories that both helps and plagues the company. After nearly a year of this endless seesaw one...

Back in the Belly of the Jolly Green Giant

Wal-Mart’s Sustainability Milestone Meeting It caught me off guard, even though I should have expected it. Seated in the front row of the Sam Walton auditorium, Lee Scott pacing in front of the room with a cordless microphone, dressed in grays and blacks, mock...

The Jolly Green Giant

On July 26th Fortune Magazine released a cover story on Wal-Mart  under the banner “Wal-Mart Saves the Planet, well not quite…” Something is going on here that I’m not quite sure we understand. Whether you believe Wal-Mart is the devil incarnate or are a cheerleader...